ASUS' Dual-Fermi GPU Card Pushes Limits of Sanity

ASUS is hardly a stranger to throwing two GPUs that would usually be found with a whole card to itself onto a single PCB. That's what it did with its MARS GTX 295 card, which was limited to a run of 1000 cards, much the same as the dual HD 5870 GPU powered Ares. It must have been reasonably successful, or maybe the engineers at ASUS just like to try crazy things to see if they work? Whatever it is, ASUS has plans to go one better by pairing two NVIDIA GF100 GPUs on one PCB along with 1536MB of GDDR5 memory (on a 384-bit interface). Naturally there is also an NF200 bridge chip present to get the two GF100 chips (with 480 stream processors each by the way) to play nicely together, along with a row of three 8-pin PCIe power connectors to provide all the juice that this monster is likely to suck down (up to 525W if my math is correct).

I think it goes without saying that this is going to be a serious card with a serious price tag, and it wouldn't surprise me if ASUS produced it in a limited quantity, much like similar past products. The pictures that are doing the rounds so far are just of the PCB, which is impressive enough in its own right, simply because of the sheer number of components included. Of course, this leaves the cooling solution that will have to be implemented up for speculation. Whatever it turns out to be, I think it is a safe bet we can expect it to be big. A card featuring dual GF104 GPUs (like the one found on the GTX 460 we reviewed today) would probably have some useful advantages over this GF100 (in pretty much every way apart from sheer processing power as far as I can make out), but it is hard not to love ASUS just for pushing the limits. Anyone for quad-SLI?

Haven't the specs and details for this card (the "Ares") already been released? Nemo has already put up this: http://www.overclockersclub.com/news/26845/
, which has links to reviews on the card. Only 1000 cards at $1.2k each. Ouch.

Oh, whoops. So... based on the specs of the GTX480, the MINIMUM power supply is going to be 1200W (quite a bit more if you want lots of ram, a high end cpu, and a couple of other types of processors e.g. sound card, network card; not to mention overclocking), water cooling at the very least, and something to keep the pcb from melting down. Plus, even if Asus manages to overcome those obstacles, Nvidia might have plans for a dual GPU card, like they usually do. Hmmm. Good luck with that, Asus.